Tourist Traps examines the entanglement of holidays, beauty, and image production as a central device in the organisation of society and the construction of mythologies designed to define hierarchies and forms of extraction and exploitation. Drawing on aesthetic theory, cultural studies and the anthropology of tourism, the issue approaches the idea of holidays, ranging from leisure to adventure and departure, in its historically gendered, classed and racialised articulations. From bourgeois leisure to state-organised holidays, vacation has long operated as a fundamental social ritual. With the Industrial Revolution and the progressive democratisation of train travel, it came to enable and regulate forms of socialisation, rest, and consumption, eventually taking its most pervasive form in contemporary tourism. Being a privileged site where desire, status and imagination converge, travelling is framed as a contested field embedded within the logics of advanced capitalism, where aesthetic experience is increasingly commodified, standardised, and unevenly distributed. The ‘tourist gaze’ is considered here as a socially structured way of seeing, and it reveals how aesthetic experience is stratified along class lines, producing divergent relationships to authenticity, landscape and cultural difference. Central to the issue is the relationship between political economy and aesthetic experience, where travel becomes a manifestation of “how work and leisure are organised as separate and regulated spheres of social practice in ‘modern’ societies” (Urry and Larsen, 2011). Holidays, in this sense, operate as a political infrastructure that governs who can inhabit and imagine the world.